ODE X. TO MERCURY. The scholiast Porphyrion says this ode was taken from Alcæus, who, he asserts, and Pausanias confirms it, invented the story about Apollo's cows or oxen. The story is celebrated Mercury, thou eloquent grandson of Atlas, Of thee will I sing, to great Jove and Olympus Gaily to pilfer. When Phoebus in wrath sought to frighten thy childhood If thou didst not restore the kine tricksomely stolen, While threatening his shafts he was robbed of his quiver ; Laughed out Apollo ! 'No English paraphrase can adequately render Palæstra, which was especially attributed to the invention of Hermes. It appears to have been originally distinct from the gymnasia, and appropriated chiefly to the training of the athlete in wrestling and the Pancratium. When towards the decline of the Republic the Romans imitated the Greeks in these and other less manly customs, they attached to their villas places for exercise called indiscriminately Gymnasia or Palæstræ, The meaning of the stanza is that Mercury taught the early races how to discipline body by skilled exercise, and express thought by cultivated language; and I agree with Orelli in construing 'voce' thus, and not as song or music, which is rather the gift of Apollo. brated in the Homeric hymn to Hermes, as well as the invention of the lyre by stringing a tortoise-shell, at whatever date that hymn was written. Horace always ascribes to Mercury the characteristics of the Greek Hermes, with whom the Mercurius of the Latins had little in common. CARM. X. Mercuri, facunde nepos Atlantis, Te canam, magni Jovis et Deorum Te, boves olim nisi reddidisses So too, led by thee, Priam bearing his treasures Thou placest pure souls in the calm of blest dwellings, Quin et Atridas.' Here Horace abruptly elevates the astuteness of Mercury from the playful thefts of infancy to the wise caution with which he leads the innocent and helpless through the severest dangers; and then naturally, and with all his inimitable terseness, the poet represents him as conducting no less safely the souls of the dead. Throughout all those stanzas, from the theft of oxen, when Mercury was an infant in his cradle, to his crowning mission as the conductor of souls departed, the same ruling idea of stealth is preserved and deified. Mercury steals the kine from Apollo, he steals Priam through the Grecian camp, he steals souls through the passage between earth and Hades, all with a union of guarded secrecy and imperturbable serenity which, throughout the more playful attributes of Hermes, imply the grandeur and inspire the awe that characterise a supernatural being. No deity can be more exclusively Greek in this combination of open joy. ousness and mystic power. It was a type of divinity as impossible to be conceived by the Latins as by the Germanic and Scandinavian races, though they all worshipped a Mercurius. Quin et Atridas,1 duce te, superbos Ilio dives Priamus relicto Thessalosque ignes et iniqua Trojæ Castra fefellit. Tu pias lætis animas reponis ODE XI. TO LEUCONOË. The desire to solve the doubts by which man is beset in the present, will, perhaps, so long as the world lasts, give an audience to those who pretend to divine the future; and of all modes of divination, astrology has been, from time immemorial, the most imposing, because it arrogates the rank of a science, and asserts that it bases its predictions upon deductions from a vast accumulation of facts. Rome, of course, abounded in astrologers, who called themselves Chal dæans, Nay, Leuconoë, seek not to fathom what death unto me— unto thee (Lore forbidden) the gods may assign; nor the schemes of the Chaldee consult.1 How much better it is whatsoever the future shall bring to endure ! Whether Jove may vouchsafe our existence more winters, or this be the last, Which now breaks Tuscan ocean in spray on the time-eaten rocks that oppose, Be thou wise; strain thy wine from the lees; and to space which thine eye can survey Cut the length thou allottest to hope. While we talk-grudging Time will be gone ; Seize the present; as little as may, confide in a morrow beyond. Nec Babylonios tentaris numeros'-i.e. the astrological calcu lations, or, in technical phrase, 'schemes,' for which the Chaldees were so famous, |